Stars seem to have a much simpler formation process than previously thought. An international team of scientists has developed a technique to determine the crucial details in star formation.
This model is based on the recreation of 16 molecular clouds in the vicinity of the Earth, less than 850 light years away , which has allowed us to observe how the light of distant stars penetrates through a stellar nursery and the dust of the molecular cloud. it is dimmed by such light. Thanks to this process, scientists have been able to reconstruct the structure of the cloud in 3D and thus have been able to find out how matter is distributed within the molecular cloud.
With the results of this research “ the ingredients of this recipe have been easily understood: only those regions in which the density is greater than approximately 5,000 molecules per cubic centimeter produce stars, and around a tenth of the gas in these regions collapses into new stars, ”says Max Planck Jouni Kainulainen, lead author of the study.
Thus, scientists have discovered that stars are formed in a much simpler way than theories suggested, and furthermore, this new model offers astronomers “a new tool to estimate the rates at which molecular clouds form stars. , without even seeing the new stars in the clouds ”, concludes Kainulainen.
